FANNY BLAKE
THE REMINDERS by Val Emmich (Picador £14.99) GIFT or burden? About 60 people in the world are known to have highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM — the ability to remember the minutiae of their own lives.
In this novel, ten-year-old Joan Lennon Scully is one of them. More than anything, she wants to be ‘important and never forgotten’, so winning the Next Great Songwriter Contest will be her way of achieving her dream.
Enter her parents’ longtime friend Gavin, still reeling with grief after the death of his partner, Sydney.
In exchange for help in writing her song, Joan agrees to recount all her memories of Sydney, sucking Gavin into the past and some unexpected revelations. Staying just on the right sight of schmaltz, this novel is achingly tender and charming. THE TALENTED RIBKINS by Ladee Hubbard (Melville House £16.99) EvEry member of Johnny ribkins’s family has an unusual talent: in his case it is making maps, not just geographical maps, but conceptual ones of unseen places, which he uses to plan a series of robberies.
To pay off an enormous debt owed to a mobster, Johnny drives from town to town with his young niece Eloise in tow, digging up loot he has buried at various relatives’ homes over the years. Meanwhile, a pair of henchmen shadow his every move.
Set among the African-Americans of Florida, Hubbard’s novel is partly a quest, and partly a chase.
So far so Hollywood-cinematic, but this is also an ambitious literary novel in which the author works hard to mix political and psychological flavours — and a helping of magical realism — into her story and characters. Sometimes the effort shows, but this is a creditable first novel. THE READY-MADE THIEF by Augustus Rose (Heinemann £12.99) SENT to a juvenile detention centre for something she didn’t do, 17-year- old Lee Cuddy escapes, only to be taken off the street by the station master who controls the Crystal Castle, a home for teenage runaways. At first, the Castle seems a place of safety, then Lee realises something sinister is afoot.
Stealing a piece of art by Marcel Duchamp, she goes back on the run, this time from a ruthless secret society whose members believe the work of Duchamp holds the answer to the cosmos. Joining forces with Tomi, an art expert and hacker, she struggles to stay one step ahead of her pursuers.
Complex, twisty and full of suspense, the novel draws on art history and physics to give the mystery its intellectual thrust, and at the same time provides an intimate portrait of the underbelly of a city.